


As for myself, I troll the net o' nights

by SSock



Category: Daniel Deronda - George Eliot, Merchant of Venice - Shakespeare, The Jew of Malta - Marlowe
Genre: Crack, M/M, Modern Setting, Period-Typical Anti-Semitism, Shylock's theory of spontaneous generation of Manischewitz, everyone is whatever-the-author-thinks-is-funny-sexual, gratuitous Daniel Deronda mockery, gratuitous Keurig, gratuitous Manischewitz, persons attempting to find a plot will be shot, the damage to that fourth wall will cost you I'm afraid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-15
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2018-09-08 16:24:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8851855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SSock/pseuds/SSock
Summary: Barabas/Antonio crossover crack. Other than that there's not much to it. <- That's a lie. It's still crack, though, but other people show up and get trolled by Barabas too.The modern setting is Bagenders-style (they've been alive for the past four hundred plus years) rather than modern dress production-style.





	1. Chapter 1

Antonio didn’t consider himself the self-pitying type. He preferred to call it melancholy, which had nobler sound but didn’t change the fact that he was sitting alone at a bar feeling sorry for himself.

He also didn’t consider himself macho. Manly, yes, but in a Renaissance sort of way, elegant and gracious, as much at home in the world of art and music as the world of business, impeccably dressed no matter the occasion, thoroughly secure in his masculinity, and therefore not the type to reject certain mixed drinks just because some arbitrary low-class types (who probably drank canned beer in stained undershirts) considered them “girly”. (He preferred to reject them based on their highly inappropriate and definitely not funny names.)

This drink, however, was giving him trouble. It was some sort of semi-frozen slush, pink swirled with purple in shades mainly found on the packaging of toys marketed toward small girls, garnished with two paper umbrellas, a violently red cherry, and a slice of orange curled to look vaguely floral. Someone had sent it to him.

He stuck his tongue into the slush tentatively. It was the most vilely sweet thing he had ever had the displeasure of tasting, and he could feel the burn of alcohol that was too high a proof to have been intended for human consumption. There might have been a touch of highly artificial flavor in there as well.

There was something scribbled on the napkin the drink had been sitting on. He peered at it. It was either a crude drawing of a tree with a curved base and two large round fruit, or a crude drawing of a set of male genitalia with what must have been intended for pubic hair. There was also a message - “With love from Malta”.

He blinked at it for a moment, and then came to a horrible realization. He had noticed when he first came in, briefly and from the corner of his eye, a head of red hair and a large nose which he had immediately decided to stop noticing on the grounds they belonged to Shylock, who was the last person he wanted to see on a good day, which this was not. He also made a mental note to avoid this bar in the future.

He knew better now. It wasn’t Shylock. He thought he might have preferred it to be Shylock, who had only ever _attempted_ murder, never _succeeded_ at it. He hoped the drink hadn’t been poisoned.

He turned around and had a good stare at the red-haired man. No, he wasn’t Shylock, and he had the same drink he had sent Antonio sitting untouched in front of him.

The man caught him staring and waved. Ignoring his better instincts, he stood up and threaded his way over to his table.

“Barabas,” he said. “Nice to meet you? Thanks?”

Barabas grinned at him. “I only got this drink,” he said. “For the cherry.” He held it up with the air of a man about to perform a magic trick. He sucked it off the stem, swallowed visibly, and then inserted the stem itself into his mouth. He concentrated for a moment and then stuck his tongue out at Antonio. There on the tip was the cherry stem, tied neatly in a knot. Antonio stared at him. He was exactly like Shylock except worse. At least Shylock had never made a pass at him, thank God. (Unless that was the point of the thing with the sheep-breeding. Four hundred years and he _still_ wasn't sure what that had been about.) Of course he’d never seen Shylock do that with his tongue either.

Antonio cast about for something to say. Nothing appropriate for someone one really only knew by reputation (and what a reputation it was) popped into his head. He went with honesty instead. “I didn’t realize you liked men,” he said.

Barabas blinked up at him innocently. “Oh, I was intended to be generally lecherous, I think. And homicidal. Mainly homicidal. But also lecherous,” he said. He paused a moment. “I like nuns.”

“Ah,” Antonio said. “Wait, didn’t you murder a convent of nuns?”

“I don’t know where people get these ideas,” Barabas sighed, and winked at what Antonio assumed was the audience sitting somewhere beyond the fourth wall.

“Wasn’t your _daughter_ a nun?”

Barabas looked pained. “I don’t like to talk about that,” he said. He pushed a chair out toward Antonio. “Sit down.”

Antonio looked at the chair. He thought about how awful Barabas was. Then he thought about the cherry stem. Then he thought about how fascinating Barabas’s awfulness was. He sat down.

Barabas leaned in until their faces were almost touching. “Have you ever seen a man piss his pants at the sound of bagpipes?” he said.

Antonio jerked back. “What? No.”

“Me neither,” said Barabas. “I think it’s his fetish.”

“Whose fetish?” Antonio was at sea.

“Shylock’s, of course,” Barabas said. 

These were not mental oceans Antonio particularly wanted to voyage into. It did sound vaguely familiar now that he thought about it, though. “The bagpipes?” he said, warily. “Or the - er - the - uncontrollable urination?”

Barabas put his hands out and shrugged expressively. “Either? Both? Fagin has a Prince Albert.”

Antonio didn’t see how this followed. He knew Fagin slightly. He dredged up the memory of yet another redhead with a green velvet tailcoat, combat boots, and an entirely unnecessary number of piercings (in fact not very many at all; Antonio felt piercings were unnecessary on general principles unless they were in a woman’s earlobes or Bassanio), who had referred to himself as a “respectable old gentleman” while Shylock snickered behind his hand. The two of them had spent the entire night laughing darkly at jokes no one else understood. Antonio had considered taking up anti-Semitism again. Even Abraham Foxman would understand, he had thought, especially when every time he went to use the toilet he found that one of the only two stalls was occupied by a sobbing Isaac of York.

“Does he,” he said weakly.

“The piss comes out both holes with one of those,” Barabas said. “It’s probably why Shylock keeps going to bed with him.”

Antonio had never realized before how intensely he didn’t want to know about Shylock’s sex life. Barabas was probably lying, he thought. God, how he hoped Barabas was lying. Barabas had also hooked one foot around the leg of his chair, which made escaping a difficult proposition.

His sanity was saved for the moment by Barabas’s cell phone.

“Darling!” Barabas said.“What is it?” He paused to listen. “Well, normally on a school night I’d say no, but as it happens tonight it would be especially convenient, so if you’ve finished your homework -” Antonio couldn’t hear what the voice on the other end was saying, but it sounded generally world-weary in the particular way of teenage girls. Portia still got that tone sometimes, in fact. “Yes,” Barabas said. “Yes, things do seem to be shaping up that way.” The voice said something else. It sound like a dismissal. “Goodbye, darling. I love you. Kisses.” Barabas hung up.

“Um,” said Antonio. “Who was that?”

“My daughter,” Barabas said. “She wanted to spend the night over at a friend’s house.”

“And she’s still in school, then?” Antonio said tentatively.

“When she wants to be,” Barabas said. “She finds modern teenagers amusing, I think. She’ll probably get bored with them in another year or so, if the past is any guide.”

“Wait,” Antonio said. “How old is she?”

“She’s been fourteen for something over four hundred years.”

Antonio didn’t ask why it would be especially convenient for her to be out of the house tonight. He suspected he knew, and he wished Barabas had asked his opinion first. 

Barabas was still talking. “Of course at that age she already knows the facts of life and we have separate bedrooms so it doesn’t matter if one of us brings someone home while the other is there, but it does tend to unnerve our guests. And then jealousy can be a problem. Did you drive here?”

“No,” said Antonio after the moment it took for the change in subject to register.

“I did,” said Barabas. “Since I’m the only one in the house who can drive at the moment. I can’t wait until she pretends to turn sixteen and can get her license again. Listen, I know a quiet spot where we can continue this conversation - in a manner of speaking - until she’s out of the house. Shall we?”

Antonio hesitated. Barabas idly picked up the cherry stem.

Antonio made up his mind. “Sure,” he said. He was probably going to regret this, he thought.

Ten minutes later he was seated in the back of Barabas’s car, with Barabas crouched between his legs and his cock halfway down Barabas’s throat.

Barabas attempted to say something.

“What?” Antonio said.

Barabas pulled his head back. “I said, when you’ve got someone’s cock in your mouth like this, do you ever get the urge to just bite down hard?”

“Nooo…” said Antonio.

“I do,” said Barabas, stroking him gently. “All the time.” And then he swallowed him again.

It was the least relaxing blow job Antonio had had in his life. For technique it was ten out of ten, though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, Shylock isn't really into watersports. He might have hooked up with Fagin once or twice, though.


	2. Chapter 2

Barabas lived in a surprisingly normal suburban neighborhood in a surprisingly normal house. The kitchen was also surprisingly normal except for the sink filled with pots and pans encrusted with the charred remains of what was probably food, which was still more normal than Antonio had been expecting.

Barabas snagged the note on the table addressed to “Dad”.

“She only calls me that when she’s mad at me,” he said fondly.

“What does it say?” Antonio said, trying to decide if they were at the point in their relationship where it wouldn’t be rude to read over his shoulder.

“Oh, the usual,” Barabas said. “Don’t kill anyone; if I must kill someone, clean it up; don’t have sex on the kitchen table - there’s an idea - if I must have sex on the kitchen table, clean it up; make sure whoever-it-is knows to keep the dishes straight - let me say, my girl, the last mix-up was one of _your_ school friends and a cheeseburger; this is why we have paper - don’t get arrested; don’t do anything that could get me arrested; don’t get anyone pregnant - can you get pregnant, Antonio?”

“Good Lord no,” Antonio said.

“Nor I. Or at least I assume it would have happened already,” Barabas said, and returned to the note. “Don’t cook anything; if I must cook something, put it out; don’t turn the house into an elaborate death trap; if we use the sex toys, pick them up afterward so none of her friends accidentally step on them like last time. Then she threatens to make me wear anything I don’t put away. I don’t know why she thinks this is a deterrent.”

Antonio latched onto the one thing that didn’t seem completely inappropriate for a father-daughter conversation. “What was that about the dishes?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Barabas said. “Just don’t try to be helpful. I didn’t invite you over here to eat. Well, not food, anyway. Would you like a drink?” He didn’t give Antonio time to answer. “Yes, you’d like a drink. What do we have?” He opened one of the cabinets. “Ignore the Manischewitz; we only have it because Abigail’s friend from the very Christian family across the street thinks it’s amusing when she sneaks it and I think it’s amusing when she gets tipsy and takes her bra off. I’m not opening a bottle of wine; your taste is obviously too good for the gin Fagin left here last time I made the mistake of inviting him to dinner - remind me to return it to him, possibly just after I’ve set it on fire - oh, I know! Brandy! That’s classy enough for you, isn’t it?”

“Yes?” said Antonio. He took the glass Barabas handed him and followed him into the living room. Barabas flopped down on the couch. Antonio sat down stiffly a decorous distance away.

Barabas looked at him and sighed. “It’s not poisoned, you know. At the very least I’m not going to poison you until you get me off.” He moved closer and took the glass from Antonio’s hand. He took a sip. “See? It’s fine.”

“You could have poisoned it just now,” Antonio said and took it back from him.

“What?”

“If you had - I don’t know - painted your lips with poison,” Antonio said. “It would have ended up in the brandy when you drank, and then I would swallow it when I drank, especially if I put my mouth where yours had been - like so.”

Barabas stared at him. “That was kinkier than I expected, coming from you,” he said. “But very Italian. The problem with your little fantasy is that any poison I put on my lips would kill me as well and I’ve died with blue balls too many times already.” Antonio added this to the growing list of things he didn’t want to know more about. Barabas continued, “Besides, you’ve chosen a needlessly elaborate and probably ineffective way to transfer the poison from my mouth to yours. There’s a better method - if you’re smart enough to see it.” He sat back expectantly.

Antonio considered the problem seriously for a moment and then realized both what Barabas meant and that Barabas was not, in fact, interested in a discussion about the relative merits of various methods of poison delivery. He put the glass down on the coffee table and leaned toward him. Barabas watched him. He had unexpectedly beautiful eyes, Antonio thought. He let Antonio put one arm around his shoulders and pull him close. His lips parted under Antonio’s and he sighed and then relaxed against him completely. Antonio sat back and looked at him. His eyes were closed and his mouth still slightly open and Antonio indulged in a brief fantasy of having been the first person to kiss him like that. Barabas’s eyes opened and he grabbed Antonio’s shirt and pulled him down onto the couch on top of him. “Remember you owe me one,” he said in Antonio’s ear.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather let the debt accrue some interest first?” Antonio said.

“I got out of that damn business years ago,” Barabas said, and moved Antonio’s hand between his legs. “And it’s been accruing interest since I blew you in the car. Also, dirty talk about moneylending? Not hot. Especially from you. Dickhead.”

Antonio shut up and began undoing the fastening on Barabas’s pants. Barabas writhed unhelpfully beneath him, though Antonio didn’t think he was deliberately trying to be difficult this time. He kissed him again, which stilled him long enough for Antonio to get his pants and underwear down around his thighs. His cock was half hard already. And circumcised. Of course Antonio had been expecting it (of course) but this was the first one he had seen up close. He took it in his hand and felt it harden further. He bent forward and kissed the head. Barabas made a small noise. Antonio kissed his way down the shaft to the base and then drew his tongue all the way back up. Barabas twisted beneath him and moaned. Antonio moved back up his body and kissed his open mouth and shifted them both so they lay side by side. Barabas moved against him desperately and Antonio took his cock in hand again and stroked it until Barabas went rigid against him and came.

“Hey,” Antonio said. “That was my shirt!”

“It’ll wash out,” Barabas said, and tried to curl into him. Antonio struggled not to fall off the couch. He got up.

“I think I’d like to put it in to soak,” he said. “And wash my hand. And possibly find some place more comfortable to sleep.”

“Uh,” said Barabas, cracking an eye open. “Bathroom’s down the hall to the left. Just leave it in the sink. And use cold water or you’ll set the stain.” He sighed. “I suppose I should get up too, if we’re moving to the bed.” He sat up, pulled his pants and underwear the rest of the way off, and wandered half naked down the hallway to the door opposite the bathroom. He was mostly asleep by the time Antonio joined him.

\---  
Antonio woke in the morning to the sound of a fire alarm and the sudden conviction that all of last night had, in fact, been an elaborate plot to murder him. The fear subsided slightly when he realized that nothing around him was obviously in flames. He pulled on the nearest pair of boxers and, perhaps foolishly, made his way to the source of the noise.

Barabas stood in the kitchen with a fire extinguisher in one hand, glaring vengefully at the smoking remains of a pan on the stove. He heard Antonio’s footsteps and turned on him a stare of such malice and hatred that Antonio involuntarily took a step back.

“Good morning, Antonio,” he said dangerously. “IHOP? Or Denny’s?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> He just wanted pancakes. :(


	3. Two unrelated short pieces

I.

"No, look," Barabas said. "We're basically the same character, so it's a threesome, but it's _also_ masturbation. Doesn't that turn you on even a little?"

Shylock looked doubtful.

"Tell you what," Barabas said. "We'll even let you take the middle first. I'm sure Fagin won't mind."

II.

“Do you have any limits?” Antonio said. “Any limits at all?”

Barabas cocked his head and whined. His ears flopped.

“No, answer me, damn it,” Antonio said, and reached down and pulled off Barabas’s headband. “Like a person.” 

Barabas huffed in exasperation. “Fine, yes, I do, in fact, have limits,” he said. “But I doubt _you’ll_ ever find out what they are.”

“Because I don’t want to be an asshole,” Antonio said. “But this is really not working for me.”

“Really?” Barabas said.

“Really.”

Barabas sighed and rolled over, revealing what Antonio had to admit was a truly magnificent hard-on. “All right,” he said. “But can I at least get a belly rub before we take the tail out?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fagin: "We're having a threesome?"


	4. A brief moment in the lives of our "heroes"

“Green,” Barabas said. He waited. “Yellow,” he added. Antonio stopped what he was doing. “Red,” Barabas said.

“What is it?” Antonio said, worriedly. “What’s wrong?” Barabas had never been upset by oral sex before, but there must have been significant trauma in his past that anyone could see he was obviously not processing well. Antonio assumed it was something like that.

“Green,” Barabas replied.

“What?! Barabas, what’s going _on?!_ ” Antonio said, slightly closer to shrieking than he would have been willing to admit.

“Are we not roleplaying traffic lights?” Barabas said.


	5. Barabas doesn't have sex

Barabas woke up in someone else's bed next to a naked body. A _live_ naked body. We feel it's probably necessary to specify this when it comes to Barabas. (“Thanks,” Barabas said to the narrator. “I was having a bit of a moment there.” He shut his eyes again, as tightly as he could. He didn’t remember the sun being this bright.) The body moaned. Barabas felt it was being unnecessarily loud and kicked it. It shrieked and sat up. Barabas opened his eyes, painfully. Shylock stared down at him in horror. His bedhead was stunning, Barabas thought. It was as if one of Rossetti’s models had stuck her finger in a light socket. Or possibly as if Einstein had had a child with Harpo Marx’s wig. (As Shylock wasn’t the sort of perverted weirdo who put mirrors on his bedroom ceiling - unlike certain other people we could name - Barabas had, at this point, no idea what his own hair looked like and was therefore not being hypocritical.)

“Did - Did we - We didn’t, did we?” Shylock said, trying desperately not to draw the obvious conclusion at waking up naked in bed with another equally naked man. (To be fair to Shylock, it wasn’t so much the idea of having had sex with another man that fazed him - even someone of the most rigid 16th century morality finds himself relaxing after four hundred years and the occasional piece of pornographic fanfiction, and Shylock, uxorious as he was, was still ultimately a stereotype whose sexual inclinations tended toward what his original audience would have considered indiscriminate depravity, and so, while he was perfectly willing to make nasty insinuations about Antonio’s private life when the opportunity arose, he felt no pang of shame at occasionally ending up in bed with, for example, Fagin, who, as it turned out, cleaned up surprisingly well - and looked mouthwatering in a corset. It was the idea of having sex with _Barabas_ that horrified him.)

Barabas was coming to the dual realization that he remembered very little of the previous night and that he seemed to be very hungover this morning. He had a sneaking suspicion that the two facts were somehow related. “I dunno,” he said, unhelpfully and somewhat indistinctly. Shylock patted around and under himself. To his vast relief the sheet was dry. He didn’t bother to try to check under Barabas. They both knew who would have ended up sleeping in the wet spot. He stretched a little, experimentally. No soreness either. “Well,” said Shylock, a little more cheerfully (but not too cheerfully, since Barabas wasn’t the only sufferer this morning). “We probably didn’t have sex again.” He paused and then added, “We really should stop doing this.”

Barabas shrugged. He privately found the idea of sex with Shylock nearly as disturbing as Shylock did, but watching Shylock panic at the idea it might have happened was one of the things that brought joy to his life.

The author decided the hangover thing had gotten boring. Existing suddenly became significantly more bearable. The memory loss remained, however.

“Why did we start drinking this time?” Barabas said.

Shylock tried to think. Disjointed scenes from the previous night flashed into his mind and were gone almost instantly. (Some of them involved full-frontal Barabas, and he wished those would go away quicker.) There was no answer to the question, however. He shook his head. “Don’t you remember?”

Barabas sighed, as if the question was too stupid to dignify with an answer. He stretched one foot out and hit a Manischewitz bottle. It was empty. He wondered how far gone they were when they decided _that_ was a good idea. “I thought you had too much class to keep this stuff in your house,” he said.

“Keep what stuff in my house?”

Barabas grabbed the Manischewitz bottle and waved it in his face.

Shylock scratched his head. “I do. Are you sure you didn’t bring it?”

Barabas glared at him. “ _That_ is the sort of insinuation people generally wind up dead for. I don’t drink that crap.” He muttered something else under his breath that Shylock didn’t catch, except for what might have been the words the words “mushrooms” and “grasshoppers”.

Shylock refrained from pointing out that he obviously did drink that crap, under the right circumstances. “Well, I certainly didn’t buy it,” he said. Barabas raised an eyebrow warningly. “And of course you didn’t either,” Shylock added hastily. “Actually, I have a theory about that - do you remember how they used to think life would arise from the right sort of inanimate matter?”

“What do you mean ‘used to’?” Barabas said.

“They disproved spontaneous generation back in the 19th century.”

“Did they?” Barabas said.

“I think it was Pasteur, actually,” Shylock said.

“Who?”

Shylock decided that he wasn’t up to giving Barabas a brief course in the history of science now, or possibly ever. “Forget it,” he said.

“Good,” said Barabas. “Make me coffee.”

“Ask nicely,” Shylock said, rather childishly.

“Make me coffee or we’ll see what happens when I put your balls in that stupid Keurig you love so much,” Barabas said. He said it in a very polite tone of voice though. Shylock decided that was probably good enough. He got out of bed. There was a trail of artistically scattered empty liquor bottles leading out the bedroom door.

He hadn’t realized he had had that much alcohol in the house. Especially that much cheap gin. He was obviously going to have to teach Fagin about the finer points of alcohol consumption (and make sure it stuck this time). Although - that one wasn’t gin. Nor had it been cheap. He picked up the empty bottle and stared at the label. “I was looking for this last week,” he said. “I was going to bring it to dinner at the Derondas’.”

“Yick,” said Barabas, eloquently.

“The father-in-law was visiting.”

“Oh,” said Barabas. “That’s not so bad, then. What jewelry did he get this time?”

“None while I was there,” said Shylock. “He wasn’t leaving for another week. Besides, they took all the really good stuff to the bank before he arrived. He said he was trying for Daniel’s Rolex.”

“Honestly,” Barabas said. “He’s doing him a favor. A _Rolex_.”

“They do hold their value in the secondhand market,” Shylock said.

“We’re talking about Daniel Deronda’s taste in watches,” Barabas said. “Not yours or mine.”

“Or perhaps Ezra’s taste in watches,” Shylock said. “I’m never sure how much of Daniel’s opinions are Daniel’s rather than Ezra’s.”

“Ezra hasn’t got opinions about watches because the Talmud doesn’t have opinions about watches,” Barabas said. “Unless he’s reading a different version of the Talmud than I did.”

“Well,” said Shylock. “If it was anything like the one I read, it was a medieval Christian fantasy focused mainly on the importance of tormenting Gentiles, so yes, I’d say he is reading a different version.”

“Yes,” Barabas said. “Well. That. I suppose. You’re not taking his side, are you?” he added suspiciously.

“Oh, no,” said Shylock. “Never.” He considered Ezra for a moment and made a face. “Absolutely _not_. (Except of course for the general undesirability of interfaith marriages.)”

“Of course,” Barabas agreed. “We can’t reject sensible ideas just because someone we dislike shares them. Weren’t you going to make me coffee?” This last was said in the sort of polite tone that reminded the listener that it could stop being polite very quickly.

Shylock put on a pair of pants first, just to show Barabas that there was only so far he could be bullied, and then headed out to the kitchen.

“Real coffee!” Barabas yelled after him. “Not instant! And not the stupid Keurig!”

“Sorry!” Shylock yelled back cheerfully (and mendaciously). “I couldn’t hear anything you just said.” He got out the box of K-Cups.

Barabas decided he’d better head out to oversee the coffee-making. Unlike Shylock, he did not stop for pants.

He paused in the doorway. “Hey! I said no Keurig!”

“Unfortunately,” Shylock said happily. “This is all I have. I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with it. Or you can leave and find your own. I’d suggest getting dressed first, though.” He smiled at Barabas and removed his now-full mug from the machine.

Barabas looked for a moment like he was seriously considering carrying out his earlier threat about the testicles. He decided it was too much trouble and settled for snatching Shylock’s coffee out of his hand.

“Hey!” Shylock turned toward the counter, looking for a towel to wipe up the liquid that was running down his arm and chest. He stopped. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, no. I know why we started drinking.”

“What?” said Barabas. “Why?”

Shylock silently held up the poster Barabas had left on there the previous night. “Interfaith Movie Night!” it said. “At Temple Beth Suburbia!” 

“Right,” said Barabas. “How long does it take for the Manischewitz to spontaneously generate?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Horribly offensive Jewish stereotypes tend not to like interfaith outreach activities.
> 
> Temple Beth Suburbia is terrible name, but Temple Beth Shalom is probably only funny if you've ever actually looked for local non-Orthodox synagogues and found that fully half in a fifty mile radius were named Temple Beth Shalom. And the internet has failed me and I can't find the name of the temple in Heaven Help Us.
> 
> Ezra actually would have opinions on watches because his day job in the book was repairing watches for the other Ezra Cohen. Though unless he's kept his hand in, he probably wouldn't have an opinion on Rolex because Rolex didn't exist until like 1905.
> 
> The Talmud probably doesn't have opinions on watches because as far as I know it significantly predates clockwork. It may have opinions on methods of keeping time. I don't know; I haven't read it. (Also, your guess is as good as mine as to how much similarity George Eliot's Talmud bears to the real one. Though evidently she did do her research.)
> 
> Ezra probably prefers Kabbalah to the Talmud anyway.
> 
> Rolex is in a kind of weird position in that people who know from quality like it and people who have more money than taste and want people to know how much money they have like it. Daniel would obviously be in the first category. Barabas and Shylock would be in both if they were contemporary(ish) with Daniel, but I'm not sure understated good taste was a thing in the 16th century. (Sumptuary laws, but not taste.)
> 
> I assume if Daniel has one it's because he needed a watch sometime in the 1960s and not because he's a watch nerd. (Though maybe David Salomons got him into it back in the 1890s and he's a crazy Breguet fanboy.)
> 
> There is depressingly little pornographic fanfic featuring Shylock.
> 
> I swear Keurig isn't paying me for this.


	6. Daniel Deronda Gets Tired and Emotional at the Gay! Bar! Gay Bar! Gay Bar! Woo! (Part 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who's back! (Not Slim Shady, though I'm pretty sure Eminem is one of Barabas's karaoke staples, along with Lady Gaga.)
> 
> If you’re not familiar with Daniel Deronda, Lapidoth is the title character’s father-in-law mentioned in the previous chapter.

Daniel Deronda, Barabas thought, was perhaps a perfect example of book-smart and street-dumb (assuming he was in fact book-smart - Barabas wasn’t entirely sure). It had been, by his watch (a vintage Rolex that he had gotten for a really superb price from Lapidoth), nearly two and a half hours and Deronda still hadn’t realized he was in a gay bar. (He also hadn’t noticed Barabas’s new watch.) Of course, he had been drinking the entire time. Of course, if he had had more sense, he would have realized he had reached his limit about thirty minutes after they had arrived. Barabas watched him miss yet another obvious come-on from one of the growing number of disappointed and increasingly puzzled men on the dance floor. He really was a beautiful creature, Barabas thought. Of course, that was the point. There would have been no reason to bring him if he had been dumb and _ugly_.

Barabas not so much heard as sensed Deronda’s phone on the table ringing beneath the music. He looked over at the caller id. “Ezra”, it said. Decline, Barabas decided, and went back to watching the fun. 

He was hoping Antonio would show up and try his luck with Deronda, which would give him the threefold pleasure of watching Antonio make a fool of himself, seeing Antonio utterly rejected, and then some time in the next few days pretending to be devastated at the idea that Antonio would even look at another man when he had Barabas. He wondered what slightly unusual sex act he could guilt Antonio into performing as atonement. (Well, possibly only “slightly unusual” by Barabas’s standards. Possibly “Sorry, _what?_ ” by most other people’s.)

He had decided against the thing with the inflatable sheep, the three oranges and the parallel bars and was being really impressed by Deronda’s ability to grind platonically - he hadn’t realized that was even possible - when his attention was attracted by something that wasn’t Antonio but was going to be ten times more fun. He didn’t know Mirah Cohen-or-Lapidoth Deronda particularly well, but he knew her well enough to recognize her, and she had just walked in with something tall, beautiful, and dressed in sea-green on her arm. Or possibly the other way around, since Something was a good six inches taller than Mirah, at least in those heels. He stored the image away for later private use and waited for Deronda to notice that his wife had just arrived. It took him what Barabas felt was an unnecessarily long time. The look of hastily-suppressed panic when Deronda recognized her companion - whoever she was - was an unexpected bonus, though.

“Mirah? _Mrs. Grandcourt?!_ ” (Gwendolen Harleth, briefly Grandcourt - for it was she! - winced visibly.)

“Daniel?” Mirah said, clutching Gwendolen’s arm. “I thought you were studying with Ezra. What are you doing at a gay bar? Is Ezra here?”

Deronda stared at her, wide-eyed.

“Why did you never tell me, dear?” she added. “I thought we trusted each other.”

“A gay bar?” Deronda said. He turned to Barabas, who had made his way over to the three of them so he could watch the show up close. “Why did you take me to a gay bar?” he said. “I’m not gay.”

“I thought you might like to not be the most effeminate man in the room for once,” Barabas said. Deronda stared at him blankly for the thirty seconds it took for that to register, and then he looked hurt.

“I should think he could do that anywhere, if he went with you,” Gwendolen said sarcastically. Barabas narrowed his eyes and things might have gone downhill very quickly if Deronda had not, entirely inadvertently, averted the imminent catfight by asking Mirah, “Wait, what are you doing here?”

Mirah looked shifty. “Girls’ night?” she said, hopefully. Deronda tried to work that one out for a minute and then leaned over toward Barabas.

“Is this what girls do on girls’ nights?” he said in what would have been an undertone if it had been possible to hear an undertone over the music.

“No,” said Barabas, who in fact had no more idea what girls did on girls’ nights than Deronda did and had chosen the answer he thought would make things more fun for him personally. Besides, he had seen the two of them come in, and he was fairly sure that, wherever it might take place, the standard girls’ night did not involve enthusiastic public displays of blatantly sexual affection. At least not outside of certain genres of pornography, which he was pretty sure the current story was not. (One of the great disappointments of Barabas’s life was how little pornography he had found himself a character in.)

Deronda crossed his arms a little unsteadily. “I don’t believe you,” he told Mirah. She and Gwendolen exchanged nervous glances.

“Daniel, wouldn’t you rather talk about this some other time?” Mirah said. “You don’t look well. Let’s find Ezra and go home, sweetheart. Please? Where’s Ezra?”

Deronda, who was shy enough to dislike public scenes as much as Mirah (and who wasn’t so far gone that he didn’t have the vague feeling that this was going to turn into a public scene, especially with Barabas facilitating), hesitated for a moment. And then, as George Eliot might say, the stubbornness of his race (fictional Jews - obviously) asserted itself.

“I don’t know where Ezra is,” he said. “Not here, anyway. And you know how much I hate secrets.”

“Daniel….”

“Mirah.”

“I have always prided myself on being nothing less than entirely honest, and I feel it has helped me immensely in both my personal and my professional life,” said Barabas. The other three turned and stared. It was such a spectacularly blatant lie that the only appropriate reaction was to applaud and frankly none of them felt like encouraging him. They chose to ignore him instead.

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about this later?” Mirah said, a little desperately.

“Entirely sure,” Deronda said.

“Well.” Mirah said. “We’re on a date.”

“A what?”

“You know,” Mirah said uncomfortably. “A date - you go out with someone - we do this all the time, Daniel.”

“But why?” Daniel wasn’t drawing the obvious conclusion, possibly because of his current condition or possibly because of a general tendency to obliviousness. (“I seem to be missing my foreskin….”)

“The usual reason?” she said. He still wasn’t getting it. “Look, ok, we’ve been sleeping together since 1902. I mean, on and off. Obviously.”

Daniel stared. “But how? Why?”

“We just - I was in Paris,” she said. “And there was an American - Natalie Barney - I don’t think you’d know her, but she was very - um - kind,” (Mirah decided that was probably the most tactful way of putting it) “and Gwendolen was there, and she remembered me, though I’m ashamed to say I had forgotten her -“ (“Oh, no,” said Gwendolen. “I’d rather you didn’t remember what I used to be like.”) “- and when I left Paris we began writing to each other and, well, things just happened.” Both women had the grace to look slightly embarrassed. Deronda just looked bewildered, but that might have been because only fragments were making it through the haze of alcohol. Barabas was enjoying himself beyond his wildest dreams. (He indulged in a minor fantasy of Deronda’s reaction the next morning, when he processed the night’s events completely sober.)

“Why did you never tell me?” Deronda said, plaintively. Something else flitted into his mind. “Threesome?” he added hopefully. Mirah and Gwendolen looked at each other uncomfortably. Gwendolen muttered something under her breath about “- my one exception -” 

(Excuse him: he’s very drunk right now, and there was a time when he thought, not wrongly, that in other circumstances there might have been something between him and Gwendolen. And Mirah is still his wife.)

“I think we should talk about this first,” Mirah said. “And not here. Please let’s go home.”

“I don’t think she wants a threesome,” said Barabas, helpfully.

“I don’t think you want a threesome,” Daniel repeated.

“It’s a really inappropriate thing to ask,” Mirah said, glaring at Barabas.

Deronda blinked at her sadly. “I don’t want to go home,” he said. “I want another drink.”

“I think that’s a really bad idea, Daniel,” Mirah said.

“I think your opinion doesn’t count right now,” Deronda said, and headed off in precisely the opposite direction of the bar.

“Oh, _no_ ,” Gwendolen said. The three of them watched him reach the wall and turn around.

“Unfortunately,” Barabas said. “The bartender here is really good at cutting people off.”

“Yes,” said Gwendolen. “I know.”

“I just don’t see how we’re going to get him home,” Mirah said.

“Threesome,” said Barabas.

Mirah and Gwendolen turned to look at him.

“Any death you could wish on me, I’ve probably already suffered. And worse,” he said. “Save your breath.”

“Do you think if we both took an arm?” Gwendolen said.

“I don’t think we could pull that hard,” Mirah said. “It takes a lot of force to detach body par- Oh, you meant Daniel. I don’t think that would work either. He’s very strong,” she added, a little smugly.

“You could always call Ezra,” Barabas suggested. The more people who knew Deronda here to cause a scene, the funnier.

Mirah considered. She felt there was some ulterior motive here, because Barabas always had an ulterior motive. But she really couldn’t see a downside to calling Ezra. Daniel was far more likely to listen to _him_. And what were big brothers for, if not to fix things? She looked at Gwendolen.

“I can’t think of anything better,” Gwendolen said.

“I’ll be right back,” Mirah said. “You keep an eye on him, ok?” Her hand lingered on Gwendolen’s arm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be continued.....
> 
> Eventually.


End file.
